Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was a principal actor in the Beat Generation, a companion of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady in that great adventure. His books include On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, Lonesome Traveler, Visions of Cody, Pomes All Sizes (City Lights), Scattered Poems (City Lights), and Scripture of the Golden Eternity (City Lights).

In the spring of 1943, twenty-one-year old Jack Kerouac set out to write his first novel. Working diligently day and night to complete it by hand, he titled it The Sea Is My Brother. Nearly seventy years later, its long-awaited publication provides fascinating details and insight into the early life and development of an American literary icon.

More than sixty years ago, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac sat down in New York City to write a novel about the summer of 1944, when one of their friends killed another in a moment of brutal and tragic bloodshed. The two authors were then at the...

Jack Kerouac's profound meditations on the Buddha's life and religion In the mid-1950s, Jack Kerouac, a lifelong Catholic, became fascinated with Buddhism, an interest that had a significant impact on his ideas of spirituality and later found...

Jack Kerouac's musings on the creative process are collected together for the first time in this exquisite book. In the 1950s Allen Ginsberg asked Kerouac to formally describe his 'spontaneous prose' method, resulting in a list of maxims called Belief...

The legendary 1951 scroll draft of On the Road, published as Kerouac originally composed it IN THREE WEEKS in April of 1951, Jack Kerouac wrote his first full draft of On the Road—typed as a single-spaced paragraph on eight long sheets of tracing...

The raucous, exuberant, often wildly funny account of a journey through America and Mexico, Jack Kerouac's On the Road instantly defined a generation upon its publication in 1957: it was, in the words of a New York Times reviewer, "the clearest and...

Jack Kerouac produced a substantial body of writings in his mercurial career. His drug- and alcohol-inspired furious bursts on the typewriter created energetic and exciting prose, chronicling his experiences and impressions of the untapped...

In introducing the fabled first draft of Kerouac's autobiographical novel-written on a single giant roll of paper, without breaks in the text, in an amphetamine-fueled marathon-editor Howard Cunnell refers to Allen Ginsberg's claim that "the published...

The Dharma Bums was published one year after On the Road made Jack Kerouac a celebrity and a spokesperson for the Beat Generation. Sparked by his contagious zest for life, the novel relates the adventures of an ebullient group of Beatnik seekers in a...

Beat Generation is a play about tension, about friendship, and about karma — what it is and how you get it. It begins one fine morning with a few friends, honest laborers some of them, some close to being down-and-out, passing around a bottle of...

Jack Kerouac is best known through the image he put forth in his autobiographical novels. Yet it is only his private journals, in which he set down the raw material of his life and thinking, that reveal to us the real Kerouac. In Windblown World...

A never-before-published book of poems by Jack Kerouac—in a deluxe package In 1952 and 1953 as he wandered around America, Jack Kerouac jotted down spontaneous prose poems, or “sketches” as he called them, on small notebooks that he...

Highlighting a lesser-known aspect of one of America's most influential authors, this new collection displays Jack Kerouac's interest in and mastery of haiku. Experimenting with this compact poetic genre throughout his career, Kerouac often included...

"In the Book of Dreams I just continue the same story but in the dreams I had of the real-life characters I always write about."Excerpt:WALKING THROUGH SLUM SUBURBS of Mexico City I'm stopped by smiling threesome of cats who've disengaged themselves...

On a blind date in Greenwich Village set up by Allen Ginsberg, Joyce Johnson (then Joyce Glassman) met Jack Kerouac in January 1957, nine months before he became famous overnight with the publication of On the Road. She was an adventurous...

On The Road, the most famous of Jack Kerouac's works, is not only the soul of the Beat movement and literature, but one of the most important novels of the century. Like nearly all of Kerouac's writing, On The Road is thinly fictionalized...

This newly-revised edition-originally published in 1973-of the haiku Jack Kerouac, Albert Saijo, and Lew Welch jotted down on the road from San Francisco to New York in 1959, are dense, earthy incarnations of life on the road: "A coral colored...

Jack Kerouac is one of America's most influential literary figures. On the Road begot the Beat Generation, which ushered in the hippie movement, then free love, then drugs and so on and so on. Yet the real Kerouac bore little resemblance to this...

These eight extended poems, composed between 1954 and 1961, offer exuberant forays into language and consciousness that combine rich imagery, complex internal rhythms, and a reverent attentiveness to the moments.

With the same tender humor and intoxicating wordplay he brought to his masterpieces On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Kerouac takes his alter ego from the football fields of small-town New England to the playing fields and classrooms of Horace Mann...

Old Angel Midnight (1959) was one result of Kerouac's automatic writing experiments in which he would spill his chemically inspired thoughts onto paper to see what came out. Though Kerouac was initially denounced by literary critics as an oddball, his...

In these uncollected writings Jack Kerouac portrays himself in his life. He hitches a ride to San Francisco with a blonde, goes on the road with photographer Robert Frank, rides bus through the Northwest and Montana, records the blues of an old Negro...

Written during 1951-52, this novel was an underground legend by the time it was finally published in 1972. Written in an experimental form, Kerouac created the ultimate account of his voyages with Neal Cassady...

Written in 1953, published in 1959 (after the 1957 publication of Kerouac's On the Road made him famous overnight) and long out of print, this touching novel of adolescent love in a New England mill town is one of Kerouac's most accessible works.

An interesting biography of what happens when fame and age taint the dream of being "on the road" in the life of this aspiring poet. The book details Kerouac's descent into alcoholism and hope for salvation. I think this is one of his greatest...

Unique among Jack Kerouac's novels, Visions of Gerard focuses on the scenes and sensations of childhood– the wisdom, anguish, intensity, innocence, evil, insight, suffering, delight, and shock– as they were revealed in the short tragic -happy life.

Centering around the tempestuous breakup of Leo Percepied and Mardou Fox– two denizens of the 1950s San Francisco underground– The Subterraneans is a tale of dark alleys and smoky rooms, of artists, visionaries, and adventurers...

In his first frankly autobiographical work, Jack Kerouac tells the exhilarating story fo the years when he was writing th books that captivated and infuriated the public, restless years of wandering...

Donald Allen, the late great editor of the Evergreen Review at Grove Press and editor of the seminal anthology, The New American Poetry, first met Jack Kerouac in 1956 when he and Allen Ginsberg came to visit at his West Village apartment...

On The Road, the most famous of Jack Kerouac's works, is not only the soul of the Beat movement and literature, but one of the most important novels of the century. Like nearly all of Kerouac's writing, On The Road is thinly fictionalized...

One of the best and most popular of Kerouac's autobiographical novels, The Dharma Bums is based on experiences the writer had during the mid-1950s while living in California, after he'd become interested in Buddhism's spiritual mode of understanding...